Convergent evolution of soma in Astrephomene

A new paper by Shota Yamashita and colleagues explores the genetic basis for soma in one of the most mysterious volvocine algae, Astrephomene gubernaculifera. By combining whole genome sequencing with cell-type specific transcriptomics, they have shown that the gene or genes controlling germ/soma differentiation in Astrephomene are different from those in Volvox carteri, but the resulting cell-type specific differences in gene expression are similar between the two.

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Nicole Haloupek on germ-soma differentiation

Volvox carteri

Volvox carteri by Gavriel Matt & James Umen.

Back in December, I wrote about two studies that compared global patterns of gene expression between germ cells and somatic cells in Volvox carteri, one by Benjamin Klein, Daniel Wibberg and Armin Hallmann from the University of Bielefeld in Germany and one by Gavriel Matt and Jim Umen from Washington University in St. Louis and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, respectively. The Matt & Umen paper has also been highlighted on the Genetics Society of America blog, Genes to Genomes.

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More evidence for co-option in the evolution of soma

One of the reasons Volvox was developed as a model organism was that it has the minimum number of cell types something with cellular differentiation can have: two. This property focuses investigations of cellular differentiation in a way that an organism with many cell types could not. In describing their move from studying avian and mammalian models to studying Volvox, Marilyn and David Kirk said,

The thing that appealed to us most about V. carteri – in addition to the genetic accessibility that Starr (1970) had already demonstrated – was the fact that it presented the germ-soma dichotomy in such a clear and simple form. Each asexual adult (or “spheroid”) of V. carteri contains only two cell types: small, biflagellate somatic cells, and large asexual reproductive cells, called gonidia (figure 1). The somatic cells are mortal; once they have provided the organism with motility for a few days they die. The gonidia, in contrast, are potentially immortal; each mature gonidium acts as a stem cell, dividing to produce a juvenile organism containing a new cohort of gonidia and somatic cells. No one has ever found a way to make wild-type somatic cells divide, but the only way to prevent gonidia from dividing is by withholding energy or poisoning them. Who could ask for a clearer presentation of one of the central issues of developmental biology: how are cells with extremely different phenotypes produced from the progeny of a single cell?

Kirk & Kirk 2004 Fig. 1

Figure 1 from Kirk & Kirk 2004. A young adult spheroid of V. carteri consists of thousands of small, biflagellate somatic cells that are embedded at the surface of a transparent sphere of extracellular matrix, and about 16 large asexual reproductive cells, called gonidia, that are located just internal to the somatic cells.

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Another take on volvocine individuality

Dinah Davison & Erik Hanschen

Dinah Davison and Erik Hanschen.

A couple of weeks ago, I indulged in a little shameless self-promotion, writing about my new chapter on volvocine individuality in Biological Individuality, Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. Now two graduate students in the Michod lab at the University of Arizona, Erik Hanschen and Dinah Davison, have published their own take on volvocine individuality in Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (“Evolution of individuality: a case study in the volvocine green algae“). The article is open-access, and Hanschen and Davison are listed as equal contributors.

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Cells, colonies, and clones: individuality in the volvocine algae

Biological Individuality

As I mentioned previously, I have a chapter in the newly published book Biological Individuality, Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. The chapter was actually written nearly five years ago, but things move more slowly in the philosophy world than that of biology. Finally, though, both the print and electronic versions are now available; here is the electronic version of my chapter. The book currently has no reviews on Amazon, so if you want to give it a read, yours could be the first. If you’re interested in current and historical views on individuality, there is a lot of good stuff in here, including contributions by Scott Lidgard & Lynn Nyhart, Beckett Sterner, Andrew Reynolds, Snait Gissis, Olivier Rieppel, Michael Osborne, Hannah Landecker, Ingo Brigandt, James Elwick, Scott Gilbert, and Alan Love & Ingo Brigandt.

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Rediscovered after two thirds of a century: Pleodorina sphaerica

Pleodorina sphaerica

Figure 1 from Nozaki et al. 2017. Pleodorina sphaerica.

There really aren’t enough people looking for volvocine algae. There’s a suspicious tendency for the geographical centers of volvocine diversity — southern Africa, central North America, southeast Asia — to include the home institutions of phycologists studying volvocine diversity — Mary Pocock, Richard Starr, Hisayoshi Nozaki, respectively. I find it much more likely that this is an artifact of sampling effort than that, for example, central Africa and Central and South America are depauperate of volvocine algae.

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J. S. Huxley part 2: Volvox

Last time, I wrote about Julian Huxley’s 1912 book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, and his use of the volvocine algae as an example. I liked most of what he had to say, though I took issue with his assertion that

…all the other members of the family except Volvox…are colonies and nothing more—their members have united together because of certain benefits resulting from mere aggregation, but are not in any way interdependent, so that the wholes are scarcely more than the sum of their parts.

This is, of course, a matter of how we define a multicellular organism, but I think any definition that excludes, for example, Eudorina, is not a very useful one.

This time, I’ll look at the rest of what Huxley had to say about the volvocine algae, most of which is about Volvox:

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J. S. Huxley part 1: Gonium

Julian Huxley was one of the biologists responsible for the merging of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis. His most influential work was Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, published in 1942. Thirty years earlier, though, he published a book on biological individuality, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Thankfully, the copyright on this book has expired, so it is now part of the public domain, and a scanned version is available for free in pdf and epub versions from Google.

Huxley Cover

Any book with Volvox on the cover can’t be all bad!

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Sex change (in Volvox)

Alexey Desnitskiy from Saint Petersburg State University has published a new review of sexual development in the genus Volvox in the International Journal of Plant Reproductive Biology. 

The article includes an up-to-date review of Professor Desnitskiy’s own work describing four developmental “programs” in the various species of Volvox:

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